This article examines the impact of the Tasi Mane oil infrastructure project, launched in 2011 by the national company Timor Gap, for implementation in local communities in the Covalima district. We focus on how the processes of land expropriation for infrastructure development and of financial compensation offered to the inhabitants has affected people’s relationship with their land and existing customary practices. Highlighting the difficulties of moving from a communal to an individual ownership regime, the prospect of compensation and the redistribution of land has exacerbated existing land conflicts and generated new identity strategies. However, the rapid process of modernisation does not simply diminish some customary practices; instead, ritual practices are creatively adapted to respond to the changing situation. In the face of rapid social and land use changes, the rituals gaining prominence are those that reinforce relations with the ancestors and connections with particular sacred sites.

Drawing from and contributing to semiotic and sensory anthropology, this article examines the role of human sensory experience in understanding existential insecurity in the coastal town of Betano, Timor-Leste. Since 2011, Betano has been undergoing preparations for the Tasi Mane Petroleum Infrastructure Project, which has introduced atmospheric changes and socioeconomic challenges to its residents. Using the concepts of qualia and qualisigns, this article analyses three events in which residents sense and make sense of olfactory pollution, damaged marine life, land appropriation, food insecurity, and destitution from future relocation. Building on this analysis, this article proposes that we account for the ways that people’s sensory experiences motivate their responses to new political and economic systems.

This article examines an alternative food movement in China called exemplary agriculture. A key characteristic of the movement is its recuperation of legacies of state socialism including exemplary morality (leadership by example and the emulation of role models) and the pervasive urban/rural dichotomy (a dichotomy that privileges the urban over the rural economically, politically and culturally). Adopting practices derived from rural culture and putting a positive spin on them, movement protagonists promote alternative urban lifestyles they believe will improve the experience of city living and the malice of modernity. Drawing on ethnographic research across organic farms and farmers’ markets, this article examines some of the tensions revealed when these legacies of socialism interact with processes of globalisation such as consumer culture. It offers insights into the changing nature of activism in postsocialist China and how new economic classes are attempting to reconfigure the cultural and moral landscape of the city.

Cambodia is strewn with places of national, local or, most frequently, village importance, considered as potent places, that is to say, places that are said to have agency and a positive or negative power of interaction with human beings. This paper emphasises the constituent principles of potency using case studies based on ethnographic research conducted between 2007 and 2015 in Pursat province, western Cambodia. Beginning with the analysis of the sanctuary of a powerful land guardian spirit called Khleang Muang, the author progressively guides the reader to all the potent places that form a network which spatially tells the legend of the sixteenth-century Khmer King Ang Chan who passed by Pursat, coming from Angkor and settled in Lovek (south of Tonle Sap Lake). Violent death and sacrifices, rituals, spiritual energy called paramī, old buildings, monasteries, precious tableware kept in the soil, trees, stones, termite mounds … all those constituents of the potency of the places are analysed. The author’s discussion of the core of potency (pāramī and paramī) enables her to show how Buddhism and land guardian spirit cults are entangled in a single still hierarchical religious system. Finally, the author analyses how potent places in Cambodia embody a process of localisation of the nation-level institution of monarchy.

Adoption, fosterage, and child exchange constitute major themes in the literature on Pacific Island societies. However, a world where the movement of people has both intensified and become more complex challenges existing approaches to the circulation of children. We examine diverse conditions of contemporary child circulation: the shift from rural to urban to international migration; the capacities of kinship systems to adapt to this change; and the significance of children's experiences in assessing the consequences of global circulation. Spanning Oceania, the subsequent five articles bring innovative theoretical and methodological approaches to the analysis of child circulation, focusing on the impact global circulation has on the well-being of the youngest generation of those who move, are moved, or are left behind. This collection asks how sturdy the meanings and the practices of adoption, fosterage, and child exchange are when individuals come into the nexus of international and nation-state laws and policies.

Domestic workers in Hanoi are known as O sin, named after the maid-heroine of a Japanese television series that was wildly popular in Vietnam in the nineties. It was in this and the following decad...

This is a doubly welcome publication: Embodied Nation not only deals with a country receiving relatively little academic attention such as Laos, but it does so by looking at sport and body cultures...

This article explores the nature of indigenous ethnicity in Borneo and its historical transformation. The principal focus is on Dayak ethnicity beneath the level of generic Dayak identity. Through examples from interior southeast Borneo, I describe a historically dominant pattern of identification with small and localised groups and the emergence of larger ethnic categories. Like elsewhere in Borneo, a condition of pervasive micro-ethnic differentiation was endemic, while larger categories were generally unimportant and mostly evolved only recently. I assess the importance of different underlying principles of collective identification for this pattern—culture, descent, kinship, locality and politics—and examine the importance of state influence for the subsequent development of larger categories. I propose that ethnicity in Borneo, as in most places, is fundamentally political. I discuss how this applies to both past and present forms, and relates to a distinctive significance of locality for collective identification.